Quotes About Perception

The present passes too quickly to notice and I've never had a grip on the future, even as an idea.

Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner-and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.

I lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.

I did not want to live out my life in the strennous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tic-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foilbles...

Nous sommes imprégnés de cynisme, d'explications psychologiques ou autres, mais la vie est toujours là, ainsi que son essence inacessible, son cycle aussi sûrement installé qu'autrefois.

Un ordinateur portable est fondamentalement un bâton utilisé par un chimpanzé pour faire sortir les délicieuses fourmis hors d'un trou dans une bûche.

There can be a wonderful substratum of thinking going on beneath the banal tonnage of human behavior. Perhaps

The language I wanted from him did not exist in his world.

In fancy Los Angeles hotel rooms there is always an uncomfortable number of mirrors that remind us why we are not movie stars.

By early February my world had considerably lightened because I spent all day seeing rather than reading or thinking, the latter of which comprised mostly of shortsighted rehearsals of questionable conclusions. This all could easily be allowed to dissipate into the landscape because I was exhausted by the fraudulence of my hard work.

Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect.

How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

Of course he wasn't listening to what I said but to all of his imagined resonances of what I said.

I just now know that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions.

We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid.

By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.

With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward," said

Of course there is nothing so immediately rewarded in America, in the arts, entertainment, or public life, as a shrill and limited consciousness.

Cara: *Flies* Gen: What? I don't have wings! Cara: Ofcourse not! You're a boy.

Stealing goods from a town store would be a criminal offense and provoke righteous indignation. Stealing muskrats from his swamp would be just another example of what the hillmen were always doing to each other and provoke, at the very most, a sympathetic chuckle. Even

Betty from down the street was one of those creatures who seemed to be operating under the notion that if she ever stopped talking, even for a second, she'd die.

Creativity. Taking something enormously strange and somehow making it strangely familiar.

See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life unseeing. I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.

Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.